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I dream up movies and songs and all sorts of rich fantasies in my head, and I do this constantly. As a consequence of this, I never get bored as I've got an incredible imagination to lean on. I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures…
Similarly, not everyone can visualize things in their mind. Pixar's founder Ed Catmull did a survey of Pixar employees and, interestingly, there wasn't that big of a skew of artists who are able to mentally visualize. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 I wonder if there's an intersection of people who do not have an internal monologue nor a "mind's eye?"
I suspect this is why sounds or pictures are so distracting to me. The thing that everyone does where they play a tv show in the background doesn't work for me. If I hear it, I have to concentrate on it. It takes a mental effort to ignore it. So when I'm at home I keep everything off unless I'm ready to watch or listen to it.
Similarly, not everyone can visualize things in their mind. Pixar's founder Ed Catmull did a survey of Pixar employees and, interestingly, there wasn't that big of a skew of artists who are able to mentally visualize. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 I wonder if there's an intersection of people who do not have an internal monologue nor a "mind's eye?"
I'm a very visual person, but I can't visualize faces at all. I have no problem remembering faces, but I can't visualize them. When I'm fully awake, I can sort of visualize other things, but it's never perfectly clear. But when I've just woken up, I can lucid dream, and then I can consciously visualize really complex 3d structures, and design mechanisms in my head much more easily than I can using CAD software when I…
Once you get it to successfully visualize with one way morph it continuously into the case you don't successfully visualize yet and push the frontier. For example if you get it to work with a small sculpture try it with a bigger one.
Or try to look at a real person face as if it was a sculpture or an object. Try changing the way you gaze at the face. Sometimes, even more so with people we care about, we don't look at them like we would look at an object but we are rather trying to look at the soul behind the mask.
There are also people who code-switch. I sometimes monologue and sometimes think abstractly.
This is interesting, because this is close to how I'd describe my thoughts. Occasionally I can go fully abstract with good focus, but most of the time I'm monologuing. Do you ever find yourself struggling to switch over to abstract thought because the monologue is just a duplication of effort?
This reminds me of some other recent articles about topics like aphantasia (no visual imagination) and severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM). People who have these conditions do not realize how different other people think.
I'm one of those that has aphantasia. No visual or auditory imagination for me, so no running monologue in my head, or view of sentences. Or, if it's happening, I can't hear it or see it. Thoughts come to me as concepts, and sort of just pop into my head. Had no idea until a year or two ago that this wasn't how it worked with everyone.
I can probably do up to 8 different subjects/thesis, but I also can imagine in: audio, touch, sound, color, space, abstract, visual, time, taste, smell, linguistic, and hyperdimensional. Couple of these things I had to practice though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a very visual person, but I can't visualize faces at all. I have no problem remembering faces, but I can't visualize them. When I'm fully awake, I can sort of visualize other things, but it's never perfectly clear. But when I've just woken up, I can lucid dream, and then I can consciously visualize really complex 3d structures, and design mechanisms in my head much more easily than I can using CAD software when I…
What about visualizing the picture of a face ? Or alternatively, like you seem to be able to visualize 3d structures, can you imagine a wax or clay sculpture of the face of the person (i.e. if you have a sculpture laying around which has a face take a look at it and try to visualize it in your head), or a coin head profile. Once you get it to successfully visualize with one way morph it continuously into the case you…
I think it might be that when I'm fully awake, I can't maintain detailed visualizations very effectively. Faces are really important to us, but perhaps imperfect visualizations of faces fail to pattern match well enough against my recognizer, and so it blanks them. Like I say, I get the briefest glimpse in my visualization, but then it blanks. But maybe I'm over-rationalizing, and my brain is just weird.
For example, I have a concept in my head that's like a hashtag but would translate to "over-optimized 80s/90s technologies that have aged poorly". It's a categorization that overlaps with a sense of frustration (typically because I'm using one) and joy that I'm seeing fewer of them these days...
I have a lot of similar "feelings" that are felt instantly, but would take dense English to express. It is kind of like observing some behaviour in a large codebase and trying to remember what's causing it. Connecting all the dots to find a satisfying explanation isn't always immediate.
This write-up on "clueyness" is a similar example to what I experience from time-to-time: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/05/clueyness-a-weird-kind-of-sad...
While reading a great discussion similar to the link[1], a comment made me realize people actually do have realistic dreams that are comparable to waking life, which absolutely floored me. I was so astonished that it felt like I had been hit in the face.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...